Traditional style colour tattoo of a wooden gramophone with a golden horn and a teal sound burst, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gramophone with sound burst on an arm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A wooden gramophone sits at the lower right, its record visible on the turntable and its brass horn flaring upward and to the left. A teal starburst with dotted shading and short black dash marks radiates from the horn, suggesting sound. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with yellow, orange and red shading on the horn and brown tones on the wooden case.

Traditional Forearm Horn Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My father wound the gramophone every evening at six, fog or no fog, because he said a horn that was never played was just a vase. It lived on the shelf above the net store in Kellan, its brass flaring out of the window like something a giant had dropped and forgotten. The only record we owned was a dance band from Glasgow, scratched a finger's width from the label, so the saxophone stuttered every fourth bar. My brother Iain said it sounded like a man trying to get out of a wardrobe. Father said that was the point of it.

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The night the Lindsay failed to come round the point, the fog sat on the water like wet wool and nobody could see the end of the pier. Ferrier's boy was out with his uncle in an open boat, and the men stood about on the slipway with their hands in their pockets, saying nothing useful. Father cranked the spring tight, set the needle down and swung the horn towards the sea, and I held the lamp so he could see the dial. The music came out loud enough to rattle the window frames, and the stutter came with it, bright and ugly and impossible to ignore.

The needle jumped the groove on the third chorus and the band began again from the start, which meant the saxophone came round sooner than it should have. Father left it. He stood with one hand on the crank and his face set, as if the record were a rope he was paying out. Somewhere out in the grey a light swung, then another, and the boat came in on that broken tune, Ferrier's boy shouting that they had heard the Glasgow band from the rocks and knew which way to steer.

Next morning the record was still on the turntable. Father lifted the arm off it with great care and looked at the groove for a long time, then put it back in its sleeve and said nothing about buying another.